After a Crazy Week of Stocks, You Can’t Stream Most of Wall Street’s Biggest Movies

It’s been a crazy week for the stock market, with amateur traders in Reddit’s r / WallStreetBets subdirectory battling traditional investors. The past few days have been filled with massive swings in stocks like GameStop and AMC and app-fueled dramas that sparked a larger debate about the nature of Wall Street as a whole.

But if you were hoping to kick back this weekend, kick back and enjoy a classic business movie about shark-like investors and overconfident Wall Street executives, you’re probably out of luck. Almost all of the major financial films are not available in the United States at this time (at least, not at the time of this article’s publication), due to the capricious nature of the streaming market, with more and more studio libraries. more fragmented and Byzantine licensing agreements that regulate what and where you can stream.

This week’s short drama makes you want The big court? You won’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Max. Right now you can Spread it with ads on Crackle, from all services. Paramount (who distributed the film) might save it for Paramount Plus, which is set to launch in March, but it won’t do you any good this weekend. Instead, your only option is to buy or rent it – which a lot of people do, it seems, given that the movie was shot in third place on iTunes.

Maybe the ups and downs of the stock market reminded you more of Martin Scorsese’s the wolf of Wall Street, chronicling the rise and fall of investor Jordan Belfort. But the Paramount movie cannot be found on any streaming platform. So unless you are willing to spend the money to buy or rent the movie (which like The big court, is putting up rental boards), you won’t appreciate Leonardo DiCaprio’s boob-fueled boast, either. The same applies to the 2000s Boiler room, which is also absent from any streaming service.

20th Century Fox’s Wall Street is – as you might expect – not on Disney Plus to stream, but it’s also not available on Hulu or any other service. If you’re looking for a financial movie to watch this weekend, the sequel, Wall Street: money never sleeps, is on Amazon Prime. There is also Margin call, which is streaming on Peacock (for now).

But Wall Street’s shortage of classic films is not a unique problem. This is one of the issues streaming services have faced in recent years as big players like Netflix and Hulu have been less inclusive and streaming services have focused more on building libraries of original content. There was a similar problem at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of viewers sought to watch the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film. Contagion were frustrated that the film was not available to stream anywhere.

The fact that iconic Wall Street films will similarly miss the big moment around ambitious investors and appalling short sales points to a bigger problem with streaming in 2021, one that will likely continue to worsen as more and more studios will continue to collect their content for their own services.

Then again, it is almost normal that the only way to look the wolf of Wall Street or The big court this weekend is to pour some extra money into the big financial machine.